Hogue is a poet. When the hurricane hit in 2005 she was living in metro Phoenix, but she'd lived in New Orleans a decade before Katrina and taught in the University of New Orleans' MFA program. Hogue admits it was a place she disliked intensely at times. Now, when she goes back, she says she has an entirely different response.

Hogue, who currently teaches modern and contemporary poetry at Arizona State University, began by interviewing 13 evacuees -- all of whom were relocated to Arizona for various amounts of time.

She recorded these documentary-style interviews, transcribed them, and using only each interviewee's words, she created 13 poems.

It was during this process, she brought Tempe photographer Rebecca Ross on board. They received a grant from the Arizona Commission on the Arts and "When the Water Came" was born. Their book was just published by the University of New Orleans Press.

Read an excerpt from Hogue and Ross' book and more about their upcoming events after the jump ...

Victoria Green, Mother of Four (excerpt)

We the people of New Orleans always talked of The Big One,but I had not heard of Katrina. Hurricanes come and go. But when Lake Pontchartrain broke, every one of us was screaming and hollering. If the lake was flooding the city, we knew it'd never be the same. These times you remember every kid you went to first grade with by name. You wonder where everybody was, the bum on the corner, the pickpocketers,the little man that's always on Bourbon Streetpainting the city. CNN was showing people on houses.This was not a strange neighborhood to me.This was my neighborhood. It's where I went to school. Where I shopped for groceries at Circle Food. I got married at that church,christened my children, buried my kin. New Orleans is the cornerstone for spirituality, the stomping grounds for psychic ability. You don't get on the bus and go somewhere else. It's our culture. You'd have to be a citizen of New Orleans to understand. I was here a week and my mother passed. She never had been sick. I think any of us would trade any charity we got to go back to August 15, 2005 and warn all our family that terrible storm would take everything away from us. But we don't get those chances. We get what we get.

"I arrived in New Orleans as a northerner with numerous expectations and stereotypes," says Hogue. "And then it changed me. This book is my offering to that culture, that city and the gulf coast."